Past Rough Gems

March 27 — April 19, 2025

Curated by J. Benjamin Burney, Out of Time examines how artists who work in painting, sculpture, mixed media, and photography, envision speculative futures while grappling with America’s complex past. Through the power of visual representation, these works challenge historical narratives, question societal norms, and propose bold new realities.

February 20 — March 15, 2025

Curated by Nathan Storey, this exhibition features six interdisciplinary artists that search for their fragmentary pieces and reimagine queer constellations as they unearth LGBTQ+ histories. They grapple with their collective pasts, allowing them to look toward queer futures.

January 16 — February 8, 2025

Curated by Rae Richards, Transnavigation investigates how trans jewelers are navigating their bodies and the world their bodies exist in—whether through reinterpreting tools, inventing alternate ways of being, revisiting ancestral practices.

March 28 - April 20, 2024

Curated by Zak Ashburn, Laugh Lines is a thought-provoking and transformative group exhibition that challenges societal norms through the lens of humor. This dynamic showcase delves into cultural critiques, using humor as a multilayered tool to expose truth, darkness, love, and more.

February 22 — March 16, 2024

Curated by Kiera McIntosh, To Offer/To Leave, aesthetically and thematically inspired by the tales of Shakespeare’s character Ophelia and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, showcases a moment in time after a decision of withdrawal has been made. Through the thoughtful inclusion of light, sound, and aromatic sculpture the viewer plays witness to the tale before them within a space contemplation.

January 18 — February 10, 2024

Curated by Jennifer Lord, Dirty Abstraction proposes an abstraction that communicates and contains cultural, ecological, political, and/or spiritual content. It is abstraction that pushes against traditional notions of pure form and into critical content. The exhibition explores the contradiction of does it matter / it doesn’t matter how much the viewer gets.

March 30 — April 22, 2023

Curated by Shawn C. Simmons, Against Nature explores the emerging field of queer ecology in response to prevailing ideas of human versus nature. As we face the climate crisis of today and tomorrow, each featured artist enacts their own utopian vision by reimagining the relationship between queer identity and nature.

February 23 — March 18, 2023

In conjunction with Denver’s Month of Photography celebration in March 2023, co-curators Nadiya Jackson and Florence Blackwell introduce five artists who have utilized their art to navigate various life-altering experiences to reach their boon. Boon (noun) is a thing that is helpful or beneficial.

January 19 — February 11, 2023

Curated by Jenny Nagashima, Sacrum unravels the layers of intimacy surrounding the universal yet unnamable sensations experienced in the womb and the complications that arise in the pursuit of recreating those feelings in our daily lives.

March 31 — April 23, 2022

Curated by Nate Craig, the makers, artists, and artisans place themselves, their story, and personhood so intimately into their craft that it is impossible to separate the maker from object.

February 24 — March 19, 2022

Curated by Brook Vann and A Grix, Virga is a collaborative curatorial project based on a relationship between selected artists’ work and the meteorological phenomena of the Virga Cloud.

January 20 — February 12, 2022

Curated by Amy Hoagland, Perception Shift investigates how different materials — projected light, shadow, ceramic, graphite, glass, and metal — can work alongside each other to shift the viewer’s way of seeing.

April 1 — April 24, 2021

Curated by Kiah Butcher, Object Empathy features three Colorado-based artists whose work explores and reimagines sentimentality through intimate and personal practices. Alongside their artworks, personal effects are displayed as ‘human artifacts’ building a bridge between empathy and objectivity.

February 25 — March 20, 2021

In conjunction with Denver’s Month of Photography celebration in March 2021, curators Genevieve Waller and Mary Grace Bernard present an exhibition of photography, collage and film works by six local artists. Referring to the well-known phrase of the evil stepmother in the Brothers Grimm version of Snow White, the exhibition title conjures ideas of representation, magic, power and narrative.

January 21 — February 13, 2021

Curated by Alli Lemon, the works included in Exclamation Point. explore play, joy, rigor, and what it means to make a “painting” in 2021.

February 26 — March 12, 2020

Curated by Robert Martin, this exhibition utilizes the subtle strategies employed for display throughout the canon of religious art; such as hanging work slightly above eye level to evoke awe and spotlighting singular works by centering them independently at the ends of corridors, transforming Union Hall into a cathedral of artistic sanctity.

February 5 — February 20, 2020

NEUwave is a dissertation on motion and emotion, intimacy and peace, connectivity and duality, nurturing and nourishment, self love and self healing. A translation through the lens of poetry, paintings, photography and sound. An introduction to the evolution of the progressive being.

January 15 — January 30, 2020

Curated by George P. Perez, Literally Behind plays with interior space by utilizing absurd placements of artworks to establish a dynamic and exaggerated installation with domestic materials.